Fabric Warp and Weft Orientation with Autoliv

Current customers’ specification require that fabric orientation (warp and weft) are clearly indicated on the cushion in a legible manner. This is today realized by printing lines in the warp direction on the rolls of fabrics. The drawback of these prints is that our automatic quality inspection devices occasionally reject products because of the print. Therefore, we are aiming to remove these prints and implement a self-usable image recognition tool that will be accessible to everyone at Autoliv and to our customers. We believe that we can benefit from the wide use of cameras on smartphones connected to a shape recognition software. Anyone who needs to control the fibers’ orientation on a fabric sub-component of an airbag can take a picture on their smartphone and submit it to the software. The solution should work with pictures from a wide range of cell phones and taken without using a camera holder; and be usable in different distances, angles and lighting conditions in lab, office and production area environments. An easy-to-use, cost-efficient and scalable software solution is strongly preferred over a hardware solution with additional equipment.

Autoliv has committed resources (incl. a team and a budget) for an internal pilot project of the solution in one of their production facilities. A successful solution may be further scaled to wide internal use e.g. to multiple production facilities. The end goal is to eliminate the need of inkjet printing on fabric to decrease errors in automated quality inspection and overall simplify the process of fabric warp and weft orientation identification.